By Akiva
EldarSuppose some Palestinian group
managed to set up a new settlement on land
abandoned by refugees of the 1967 war in the
Jordan Valley. What would your average Israeli
patriot have to say about an Israeli contractor
who agreed to build it, or about Jewish workers
clambering on Palestinian scaffolds? What an
outcry we'd hear from the Israeli right about
such traitors! Never fear, our forces would
never allow the uncircumcised to fix even a peg
in the occupied territory under absolute
Israeli control (some 60 percent of the West
Bank ). The imagined scenario of Jews building
homes for Palestinians was created only for the
sake of discussion - specifically of the
protests in Israel against the ban recently
imposed by the Palestinian Authority against
Arabs working in the settlements.

It
takes no small amount of audacity to threaten
the Palestinians with harm to their economy if
they refuse to continue building Israeli
settlements on their own land. Only we are
allowed to threaten boycotts every Monday and
Thursday against countries that dare to
criticize us. After all, we, as is well known,
have the monopoly on patriotism. Remember the
treatment the Etzel and Lehi underground
militias meted out to Jewish girls who went to
bed with British soldiers?

"Buy Israeli
goods" is an important ethos - with emphasis on
the word "Israeli." Many Israelis, including
this writer, and peace-seekers all over the
world boycott products made in the settlements.
But if Palestinian factory workers dare leave
their jobs in the Barkan industrial zone in the
West Bank, the president of the Manufacturers
Association, Shraga Brosh, says he'll make sure
that the government closes off the Haifa Port
to Palestinian goods.

The entire world,
with our American friends at the forefront,
insists that the beefing up of settlements in
the West Bank and East Jerusalem cannot be
reconciled with the "two states for two
peoples" solution. How can the Palestinian
leadership be expected to stand by idly while
25,000 Palestinian workers put a stamp of
approval on the occupation through their own
labor and the sweat of their own brows? Just as
the Paris Protocol - the economic agreement
between Israel and the PA - does not obligate
Israel to employ Palestinian workers in Kfar
Sava, neither does it prohibit the Palestinians
from imposing restrictions on Arabs working in
Ariel.

The commotion over the PA's
economic campaign against the settlements
indicates, more than anything else, how the
colonialist mindset has been branded into
Israeli consciousness. The protests over the
threatened loss of the hewers of wood and
drawers of water shows how hard it is to shake
off the master-servant attitudes that have
taken root over the last 43 years. The gap
between the economies of Israel and the
occupied territories, the security restrictions
on entering Israel and movement within the
territories, and the discrimination in favor of
Israeli goods, have all forced the West Bank's
labor force into the settlements. The settlers
have also become dependent upon this
asymmetrical relationship between themselves
and the natives: Why should they accommodate
Chinese workers on their holy land if they can
get cheap Palestinian laborers who go home at
the end of the day.

If the government of
Israel were genuinely interested in the
partition of the land, it would follow in the
PA's footsteps and cut itself off from the
settlers. In addition to freezing construction
in the settlements, it would cancel the special
benefits enjoyed by the industrial zones in the
territories, which attract greedy
entrepreneurs. Instead of encouraging
settlement beyond the Green Line, the Israeli
government would promote legislation for
compensating those settlers willing to come
home. Instead of hiding behind the
self-righteous claim that it is providing
livelihoods for thousands of indigent laborers,
let the government open the Israeli markets to
more goods and workers from the
territories.

Meanwhile, what will happen
to the workers who the Palestinian Authority
will compel to leave the building sites, fields
and factories that the settlers have
established on the Palestinians' land? Who is
going to feed the tens of thousands of families
whose breadwinners will lose their jobs? The
Palestinian economics minister, Hassan Abu
Libdeh, has promised that before the boycott
regulations go into effect, the government of
Salam Fayyad will help those who work in the
settlements to find jobs within the PA. The
boycott of settlement produce, he says, has
already increased the consumption of goods
manufactured by Palestinian plants as well as
the demand for local labor.

The economic
divorce of Palestinians from the Jewish
settlements is an important step toward divorce
from Israel's occupation policies. Buy
Palestinian.

The
views
expressed in this article are those of the
author and do not
necessarily
reflect
those of The Jerusalem Fund.